Notes on the Intelligentsia

Abstract

There has been an intelligentsia of some kind in every society, from the days of the soothsayer to the Academy of Sciences; men, that is, not merely living by their wits (otherwise crystal-gazers and Stock Exchange operators would have to be included), but in some fashion occupied with abstract or general ideas of meaning to mankind. Like other social groups this one has had a chequered history, with its heroes and leaders and deserters. It bears the scars of its past, and has many ancestral defects to overcome. In every region there is a special study to be made of its evolution; a task surprisingly little undertaken hitherto, because scholars in the modern West, scattered over a complex social spectrum, have been little conscious of an intelligentsia as an entity; they no longer have a common name for themselves, like the "clerk" of the middle ages. Historians have been drawn to the study of peasantries, aristocracies, groups that may on the surface have a clearer outline, though in reality they too have nearly always been conglomerates. Social categories have seldom coincided exactly with the economic categories of class, and it might be as reasonable to speak of the intelligentsia as a class, in the looser sense, as of the nobility or the "middle class".